My biggest issue with polls is that the media tout them as predictions, ignoring the fact that even if the data is 100% valid, circumstances can change dramatically in just a couple of days.
I maintain that polls are not actionable data for voters. They can help campaigns see trends and gauge the effectiveness of messaging, but they are useless to voters.
They can and do change in just a couple of days, but the real issue is that the media invariably fails to mention the margin of error or confidence interval.
It’s always Candidate A 51%, candidate B 49%. When in reality it’s inevitably something like “There’s 19/20 chance that candidate gets between 48.5-53.5% of the vote, and that candidate gets between 46.5-51.5% of the vote.”
And then when candidate B wins, the media will go “Why did the polls get it wrong?” when the election was always to close to call definitively.
Oh, and this is obviously ignoring the far more sinister use of misrepresented polling data, micro-demographically targetted thanks to big data harvested from social media. Think Cambridge Analytica algorithms which have determined that women in village X with one child and dog, being more likely to vote party Y, and then targetting them on social media with stories about the polls showing the result is a foreglone conclusion and that there’s no point voting.
My biggest issue with polls is that the media tout them as predictions, ignoring the fact that even if the data is 100% valid, circumstances can change dramatically in just a couple of days.
I maintain that polls are not actionable data for voters. They can help campaigns see trends and gauge the effectiveness of messaging, but they are useless to voters.
They can and do change in just a couple of days, but the real issue is that the media invariably fails to mention the margin of error or confidence interval.
It’s always Candidate A 51%, candidate B 49%. When in reality it’s inevitably something like “There’s 19/20 chance that candidate gets between 48.5-53.5% of the vote, and that candidate gets between 46.5-51.5% of the vote.”
And then when candidate B wins, the media will go “Why did the polls get it wrong?” when the election was always to close to call definitively.
Oh, and this is obviously ignoring the far more sinister use of misrepresented polling data, micro-demographically targetted thanks to big data harvested from social media. Think Cambridge Analytica algorithms which have determined that women in village X with one child and dog, being more likely to vote party Y, and then targetting them on social media with stories about the polls showing the result is a foreglone conclusion and that there’s no point voting.